It just so happened that for most of my life I've lived in the suburbs.

The interesting part about the writing process is that you can never see all the way to the end, not if something is happening over the course of a year and a half, or two years.

She told her therapist it reminded her of coming home the summer after her freshman year at Rutgers, stepping back into the warm bath of family and friends, loving it for a week or two, and then feeling trapped, dying to return to school, missing her roommates and her cute new boyfriend, the classes and the parties and the giggly talks before bed, understanding for the first time that that was her real life now, that this, despite everything she'd ever loved about it, was finished for good.

Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.

I no longer believe that just about everything is funny, if viewed from the proper angle.

I find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.

Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.